


Fathoms.

by outpastthemoat



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: Jedi Apprentice Series - Jude Watson & Dave Wolverton, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Father-Son Relationship, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Visions, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Master & Padawan Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:02:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26503339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outpastthemoat/pseuds/outpastthemoat
Summary: His padawan grows at an unsteady rate, picking up things by leaps and bounds within the course of mere days, then steadying out for long stretches of cycles, slowly improving his new skills.  As with everything, his latest accomplishment had come on suddenly, taking Qui-Gon by surprise the first time Obi-Wan collapsed on the floor of the training room, shaking like a leaf caught in a high wind.Written for the QuiObi Reverse Big Bang.  Art by the incredible kyber_erso.
Relationships: Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 41
Kudos: 248
Collections: Backwards QuiObi Bang





	Fathoms.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aoraki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aoraki/gifts).



This was written for the QuiObi Reverse Big Bang based on this lovely art by kyber_erso! Thank you for sharing your amazing artwork.

* * *

He only sleeps this deeply at the Temple; most Jedi acquire this habit. Hyperspace travel lends most Force-users an uneasy and disturbed rest, and opportunities for long periods of sleep during a mission are rare. Qui-Gon cannot fall into this kind of boundless slumber until he returns to Coruscant, secure in the safety of his own quarters, with the murmuring Force-sense of thousands of Jedi living and breathing close by, a familiar melody he has heard often enough to be able to hum along with the words. 

In the next room over, his padawan awakens with a sharp cry. Qui-Gon wrenches back to alertness. 

_There is no threat here_ , the Force whispers to him, and he believes it. The only danger is in places unseen and unknowable. 

The cry breaks off abruptly into a choked half-sob. 

He slows himself purposefully, calms his racing heart, takes note of his surroundings. Within his quarters, there is nothing but the vestiges of his dreams and the night, Coruscanti light gleaming in silver bars across his walls. Outside his room, however, there comes a faint whisper of life and movement, footfalls slipping across the tiled floors just as they had the night before, and the night before that.

His padawan is finding rest elusive of late, even here at the Temple.

Qui-Gon watches the flickering silver bars dancing across his walls and breathes. In, out. He puts out a question to the Force. 

_What has changed?_ he asks. _Will he tell me tonight? Should I press him, if he is not forthcoming?_

The Force answers in a complicated pattern of speeder lights and shadow that he cannot decipher. But a faint sense of distress trickles down to him from the thin line of connection between himself and the boy, a shivering of ice up and down the back of his neck. 

_Obi-Wan?_

He brushes against their connection, but there is no answering touch. The brief contact dissipates, as quickly as it had come. With a sigh, Qui-Gon rises from his sleep couch and wraps himself in his dressing gown.

In their quarters, the boy is moving restlessly in the shadows. “Obi-Wan,” he calls softly, and the movement halts. 

“I did not mean to wake you, master,” comes his apprentice’s contrite voice from the half-darkness.

“Are you all right?” Qui-Gon asks.

“Yes, master, of course. I only wanted a drink of water.”

Silently Qui-Gon activates a glow panel and steps over to the carafe set out on the table. He pours a glass of water so cold that he feels condensation bead up beneath his fingers.

He takes the time to study the boy. At times Qui-Gon is not sure the boy is even aware of their connection. His padawan has not consciously accessed their bond to his knowledge, and the only times he appears able to reach Qui-Gon is in moments of extreme emotion, so steadfastly shielded as he is most of the time. 

Obi-Wan gives away nothing in his Force-presence, wrapped so tightly around himself that he almost ceases to exist to Qui-Gon’s senses. But his eyes are rimmed with red.

He hands the glass to Obi-Wan, who drinks it down slowly. The boy does not meet his master’s eyes, but rather keeps his face turned towards the window. It is winter on Coruscant, a season marked only by the frequent allowances for rain that builds up in the planet’s atmospheric controls. Drops of water are beginning to slide down the narrow plane of transparisteel.

“Is there something on your mind?” Qui-Gon asks, as he has the night before, and the night before that.

“No, master. Nothing at all.”

This response is not surprising. Obi-Wan has met his inquiries with the same stoic words for days now. And the Force offers no recourse for handling a padawan who will not admit to a perceived weakness of any kind. Qui-Gon holds back a sigh. 

He has been Obi-Wan’s master for some time now, and yet if pressed, he could not say what sort of texts his apprentice might wish to read for pleasure, or what his thoughts consist of in certain moments, quiet and studious to all outward appearances, but eyes faraway. 

He would like to know. But Obi-Wan seems to slip out of such conversations before Qui-Gon is entirely aware of his deflection. 

_Where are you, padawan, to be so far away from me right now?_ he would inquire.

_I don’t know what you’re talking about, master, I am right here,_ Obi-Wan would reply glibly, and so every conversation ends as it begins: in silence, or perhaps with a sudden compulsion to stand up and make a cup of tea, and to steer their discussion to less nebulous subjects.

Tonight is no different.

Obi-Wan sets the glass down on the table. A final _Goodnight, master,_ and he walks sturdily back to his room. The door whisks shut silently after his padawan, leaving Qui-Gon looking after him, half-wondering if he had only dreamed up the feeling of distress after all.

Qui-Gon returns to his room. But after such a waking, he cannot find his way back to sleep. 

Occasionally his predictable, by-the-book padawan reacts in ways Qui-Gon had not expected, suggesting there is more going on under the surface of that studious demeanor that he has previously been aware of. It seems the Force has sent him a padawan so set on obscuring himself that he buries parts of himself before Qui-Gon even knows to look for them. His sense is that there is a deep forest inside the boy, all but hidden under layers of fog and canopy so thick that even sunlight might find it difficult to break through.

He has flashes at times of the boy Obi-Wan might be underneath. A sudden quip, a chance remark, the occasionally dreamy look on his face when he is not conscious of Qui-Gon’s attention. These rare glimpses catch him by surprise and startle him out of complacency, a feeling of _Ah, there you are. I thought that might be you._

He has seen so many different Obi-Wans in their brief time together. The laughing boy. The solemn student. The frightened child. 

_I cannot seem to understand him at all,_ he admits to the Force. _What am I to do with such a boy?_

If the Force answers his question, it does not use any language he understands.

Qui-Gon breathes. In, out. 

He resolutely turns away thought after thought until sleep finds him again. In his own dreams, he goes chasing after a mirage in the shape of his padawan, only to watch as the boy he follows disappears, as if obscured by a low-hanging cloud.

His padawan grows at an unsteady rate, picking up knowledge by leaps and bounds within the course of mere days, then steadying out for long stretches of cycles, slowly improving his new skills. As with everything, his latest accomplishment had come on suddenly, taking Qui-Gon by surprise the first time Obi-Wan collapsed on the floor of the training room, trembling like a leaf caught in a high wind. 

Qiu-Gon had understood what was happening even as the boy hit the ground. The first vision had been brief, but he knew instantly what it signified, to have the Force touch his student in this way. Visions might be few and far between when they first begin to emerge; but the frequency and duration would increase and length as the years pass.

Once the Force had moved through his padawan in this fashion, it would do so again. And again, and again, using the boy as a conduit for the rest of his life.

His chest had ached as he reached his padawan. He turned Obi-Wan's head to the slide and kept his hand pressed against the boy’s chest as he trembled, until at once all the tension had drained away, and Obi-Wan slowly opened his eyes. 

The boy had pushed himself up and pulled his knees against his chest, jerking away from Qui-Gon’s concerned hands. Obi-Wan pressed his knuckles hard against his eyes.

“Can you tell me what you saw?” Qui-Gon had asked, as gently as he could.

“ _No,_ master.”

At times Qui-Gon is awed by the depth of his padawan’s connection to the Force. He has read his student’s file, knows that Obi-Wan was brought to the Temple with only the bare minimum of midichlorians acceptable for training. 

And still. 

His student’s complete trust and surrender to the Force puts Qui-Gon’s own mastery and ability to control the Force to shame. He has seen in practice how fully Obi-Wan opens himself up to the Force—he holds back nothing of himself. Perhaps that is why the boy has been chosen to hold the knowledge of what is to come. The Force may not have chosen him, but Obi-Wan choses the Force, time and time again. 

Obi-Wan would not speak of the visions that had passed in front of his eyes then, or any of the nights afterward. 

And now— 

Now, with the gray light of morning flickering between the window slats, his padawan smiles brightly as he pours his master a cup of tea. 

“Good morning to you, master.” As though there had been no nighttime conversation at all. 

Qui-Gon looks at him closely, but the boy’s swinging braid obscures his face as he carries the emptied teapot back to the counter. “Do you wish to tell me something?” he asks neutrally, and the boy stops short, braid still swaying.

“Nothing to speak of, master,” Obi-Wan replies, and when he turns around his face is calm, and he begins to talk of his assignments and courses, his difficulties in his studies, the mission they will depart for in several hours. And Qui-Gon—

He has never been able to look directly at a thing that pained him. 

So he lets his student go on speaking of nothing, and he keeps on nodding along, and sipping his tea. 

_Obi-Wan does not let his visions trouble him. He is resilient, as all Jedi should be,_ Qui-Gon consoles himself. 

_He allows nothing to reach him,_ the Force suggests in return. _You would do well, master, to discover why._

His gaze falls upon an empty glass left out on the counter, and Qui-Gon wonders again how to reach Obi-Wan now, when he has tried so many times before and failed. 

The Council is sympathetic to his padawan’s struggles. Still, this must be managed, as with any other hardship. Obi-Wan must learn to live with the visions, to work around them, to predict their arrivals as much as possible. The masters suggest that frequent meditation will assist the boy, providing an outlet for the Force to work through him when he is readied and prepared, rather than wait for the Force to build up and overflow, taking him by surprise. Therefore Qui-Gon is assigned to the Vellios sector as scheduled, and as he goes, so goes his padawan.

The Vellios sector is unremarkable; even Obi-Wan, to whom new places are always of great interest, does not seem particularly impressed by the planet to which they are assigned. They are here for the purposes of observation during the sector’s census, and while they find plenty to do, little of it seems to be an accomplishment. They traverse the streets of Argos; long, difficult days, made harder by the need for concealment of their lightsabers and identities. The people of Argos have no love for the Jedi, and Qui-Gon and his padawan are here because of a Senatorial request for observation rather than a planetary request for aid. 

Ordinarily Qui-Gon would object to this sort of assignment. He does not agree with the Council’s decision to uphold Senatorial requests of this nature. In his opinion, this feels far too much like political subterfuge rather than diplomacy. 

He has not been on the planet very long before he senses the tension on Argos. He takes note of the wary faces and reserved demeanor of those arriving at the capital. He is careful to keep to the background, to remain alert for potential threats. And yet nothing of note happens, leaving Qui-Gon with an uneasy mind and a need to keep Obi-Wan close. He does not suggest that they split up to cover territory seperately, and he does not encourage the boy to venture out on his own. 

“Keep up,” Qui-Gon reminds his padawan as they enter a crowded market of vendors and sellers. With so many beings, it is an easy task to blend in. Qui-Gon folds into himself somewhat, only to be jostled aside by elbows and other jointed appendages. 

He loses Obi-Wan then, somewhere among the baskets of fish and eel and the spice-barrels. Qui-Gon feels along their connection, but the trail sputters out with no response. He fights a worry that threatens his composure, that he cannot find the boy for a reason other than Obi-Wan’s duracrete shielding. 

_Where is he?_ Qui-Gon demands of the Force. He scans over heads, then Obi-Wan appears at his side, panting rather. He fights the sudden impulse to lay a hand on the boy’s head. 

“Do not get separated from me,” he says sharply. “We are at a disadvantage. We are not welcome here.”

Obi-Wan draws his robe around him and disappears into the Force, just as Qui-Gon has. “Yes, master.”

They spend their time in the most populous places of the city, learning the rhythms of the pedestrians, the fluctuations of life. The marketplace grows daily with the influx of beings arriving for the census. Vendors must be bringing in a tidy profit selling fruits and baked goods to the new arrivals. It seems as though each new day brings new stalls and sellers, with items to purchase from all over the sector.

Once, Obi-Wan is captivated by a peddler selling the same musical devices they have come across throughout the city, a strand of beads that, when touched, create haunting glass-notes that seem to chime on several frequencies at once. 

Qui-Gon watches Obi-Wan dig through his robes and hand over some credits to the vendor in return for one of the music boxes, and wonders at that. A padawan does not possess much in the way of a stipend, only a few diatries every fiscal year, and what leftover change they might retain after a mission at their master’s discretion. If he is correct, Obi-Wan has spent the majority of his allowance today. 

“What have you found?” he asks when Obi-Wan returns to his side. 

Obi-Wan holds up the device to show him. “It makes music. Like this—you play it like water, they say. The tidepools make this note, and the little streams sound like this. The people of Nant play these near their beaches, to call their divers back from the deep waters.”

At night in their rented hostel, Qui-Gon reads on his datapad, Senatorial briefs and news reports from the sector, while Obi-Wan fiddles idly with the music box. 

He listens to the rolling chords of the music box absently. Obi-Wan appears transfixed by the device. The beads produces a cascade of harmonies, lonesome and strange to his untrained ear. Finally Qui-Gon sets down the datapad. “That is a lovely sound,” he observes.

His padawan glances up. “Yes,” he agrees. “It is quite beautiful. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

“What do you like about it?” Qui-Gon asks, pressing a little. He is curious about the device itself, as well as Obi-Wan’s propensity for it. And he is also curious to see what Obi-Wan might tell him about something he is interested in.

“Oh—I don’t know.” Obi-Wan appears uncomfortable. Is it a difficulty with expression, Qui-Gon wonders, or something else? He reaches out to brush against Obi-Wan’s mind, but encounters the wall there. It should not make him so uneasy, how his apprentice can wall himself away. 

_Does nothing touch the boy at all?_ he had wondered early on. _He must feel something. Anger, certainly, and joy and wonder and grief. Yet he does not reveal these things to me._

There is a saying among the Jedi that some padawans come to a master with minds as placid as still pools, with only the faintest ripples across the surface; the work of a master is to introduce new thoughts, ideas of greater complexity, to add growth and depth to these minds. But Qui-Gon’s padawan has come to him with greater depths than he has ever expected, or knows how to handle. 

He so rarely knows what his padawan is thinking. Obi-Wan is a closed book to him. He catches glimpses of words and phrases in those brief moments when a stray wind ruffles through the pages of the boy’s soul, sometimes he can almost make out a sentence; then the book falls shut, keeping him out. 

_There is so much of him beneath the surface. It is my task as a master to reach him. And yet I fail, again and again._

He sighs. “Meditation, padawan.”

Obi-Wan obediently places the music box away, and kneels at his master’s side, tucking the edge of his robe underneath him. In another Jedi, Qui-Gon might sense a slight vibration of a mind in tune with the Force’s harmony. But Obi-Wan barely registers in Qui-Gon’s senses, so contained he is. 

He lets himself fall slowly into the Force, water droplets sliding off a leaf, beads slipping off a string, notes in a chord until he is as deep into the Force as he prefers to go. Light meditation suits him best. He often likens the sensation to watching light play on the surface of the water, following the course of rapid currents flowing downstream. 

At his side, his padawan delves in the deeper waters of the Force. Obi-Wan regularly goes deeper in his meditation than Qui-Gon would have expected for so young a student; it always surprises him, and leaves him with a faint sense of disquiet.

_The student often leads the master as much as the master leads the student_. _Where does he go?_ the Force prompts him slyly, and Qui-Gon is intrigued. He turns away from the sunlight waters, and follows his student down into the blue-black depths. 

The Force is colder here, the water heavy and weighting him down. He catches a faint glimmer of light from far below him, and almost decides to press on, to discover its origin - but something holds him back. Then he turns away with reluctance, heading for clearer water.

Then, with surprise, he finds himself brushing against Obi-Wan’s mind. It is only the briefest of touches, but he is surprised by the intensity of it, fragments of thought and wisps of feeling filtering through the boy’s soul, before he seems to feel Qui-Gon’s presence and folds himself back away. 

When he opens his eyes again, Obi-Wan is already pushing himself up and out of his kneeling pose, hurrying to remove his robe and tabards and boots and prepare for bed. 

Qui-Gon remains on his knees. He thinks of the notes in a harmony, a strand of clear gray beads. He picks the music box from where Obi-Wan has left it on the floor nearby. The chords ripple from his light touch.

“May I keep this for a while?” Qui-Gon asks.

“Yes, master. I don’t mind.”

“I thank you for allowing me to satisfy my curiosity,” he murmurs, touching his fingers to the beads.

“Of course. Goodnight, master,” Obi-Wan replies, curling up on his sleep couch. 

The boy falls asleep like turning off a light, while Qui-Gon sits up, fingers rolling across the beads and listening to their murmured song. After some time, he feels the dreams emerge, rolling out through their small rented room.

Dreaming is the only time when his young charge’s mind is unguarded. Sometimes he might catch a glimpse of feeling then, a stay image that brushes up close to his own mind, traveling down their tenuous connection. At times Qui-Gon stays up later than he means to, only half-conscious of his reasoning for doing so. 

He is still awake when he hears his padawan ask for him in his sleep. 

“ _Master,”_ Obi-Wan calls, curious and unafraid. Qui-Gon hears that tone of voice, and stops the melody of the music box suddenly, though there is no reason for it. 

Later, when he is in his bed and near sleep, he pulls that timbre out again, while swaddled in his connection to the Force, and marvels over it like a great mystery of the universe, why Obi-Wan should call for him, and why his voice had sounded like that.

The days pass, and the uneasiness stays with Qui-Gon, dogging him like a determined shadow. He communicates with the Temple and the Senate advisory committee, the local authorities who begrudgingly accept his continued presence; he walks the streets looking for answers. 

Obi-Wan perhaps states it best when he tells his master one night, after returning to the hostel, “There’s nothing wrong—and yet there’s nothing right about this place, either.”

“I think you’re right,” Qui-Gon says grimly. He can feel the tensions building, almost to a shatterpoint. The crisis has not occurred yet, he thinks, but that there is something coming, he cannot dispute. He wonders if Obi-Wan has seen something through the Force, if his words hold a touch of premonition to them.

But Obi-Wan lies down on his sleep couch, and though his sleep is troubled and restless, his padawan does not speak for the rest of the night.

As with all things, much is revealed with time. It is evening in the crowded marketplace, the crush of many footsteps and cacophony of voices almost overwhelming by their sheer scale, when he feels the familiar-by-now build-up of the Force, dangerously surging high and higher. 

_Danger, danger._

He is quick to ignite his lightsaber, he can hear Obi-Wan’s saber snapping into existence nearby. Obi-Wan is ahead of him, separated only by mere meters, when the pressure bomb detonates.

The pressure bomb hits a nearby building, and glass and durasteel spray out, raining down on them. 

_“Master!”_

It is instinct rather than conscious thought that drives him to respond to Obi-Wan's voice. Qui-Gon surges towards him, driven by an impulse he cannot name to protect his charge. Even as he pushes forwards, he wonders if this is what Obi-Wan had been seeing in his visions, if this was what the Force had warned him of. 

Smoke and fragments of rubble are floating through the air, obscuring his vision. Ash is drifting across the road from where a fire has taken hold of a building. 

He finds the boy is standing, his lightsaber still lit. Blood drips from a cut on the side of his face.

Qui-Gon halts, but does not turn off his lightsaber. Shadows are cast on the walls of the ruined buildings, blue and green and strange half-shades in between where their sabers’ light crosses. Obi-Wan trembles.

He comes to stand close to his shaking apprentice. He does not touch the boy, afraid to startle him. 

“Are you hurt?” he asks quietly. “Obi-Wan?” 

This time Qui-Gon recognizes the signs. His padawan’s eyes are wide open, reflective and unfocused, his mouth slightly open. 

“Obi-Wan,” he says immediately. “Be calm. Let it wash over you, don’t try to fight it.”

Too late. The Force sweeps in like a tidal wave, and drags his apprentice under with it. 

He tries to feel along their connection and offer reassurance, but it is as if he is shouting underwater, his breath and words taken from him and carried off on a current out to midnight water where nothing, not even an echo, might return. 

“Obi-Wan, we must leave. Padawan, Obi-Wan.”

His padawan does not look at him. Qui-Gon touches his hand, and when the boy does not pull away, he wraps his fingers around his padawan’s wrist. 

_Where is your padawan, master?_ the Force asks sharply. 

He takes the lightsaber from Obi-Wan’s loose grip and clips it to his belt alongside his own hilt. Then he kneels, taking both of the boy’s hands in his, and sinks into the Force.

Qui-Gon is deeper in the Force than he has ever gone before. The shallow waters of life and energy are far above him, and he is surrounded on all sides by dark water. Somewhere beneath him, he knows, is Obi-Wan.

_Padawan,_ he calls, but his words do not reach the boy, as far away as he is, and Qui-Gon’s voice is carried further with each passing wave. 

He cannot go further without taking the risk of losing himself in the Force. He casts about for something to reach his padawan. He thinks of the music box, Obi-Wan's quiet joy in the delicate chords. He calls up the sound of the harmonies, and holds out a note like a lifeline. 

Obi-Wan must hear him. He catches hold, and then their connection flares to life.

Qui-Gon pulls him close, and lets himself be buoyed up, back to sunlight and warmth. Something both familiar and unknown glints at him from the depths, and this time he turns his head to look as he rises.

He skims the surface of the Force, holding Obi-Wan tight to him until the water is clear and filled with light. Then he rises, pulling them both out of their shared trance.

“Obi-Wan.”

His knees ache from kneeling, and the ground still rocks from far-off explosions underneath his feet. The Force gives him a warning nudge, and he hears the muted voices saying _Jedi, Jedi._ They have been noticed. 

“We must leave. Can you walk?”

Slowly his padawan looks up at him. His eyes are distant.

“You must stay close. Hold on to me,” he instructs, and when Obi-Wan does not move, he gently guides the boy’s hand to grip a section of his robes. "Do not let go." 

Qui-Gon feels the tug of his padawan’s hand on his robes as he moves them quickly through the crowds, a reassuring indication of his padawan’s presence. He keeps his hand on the hilt of his lightsaber underneath his robe, and his mind alert for danger. 

The grip on his robes slackens momentarily when they near the hostel. He glances over his shoulder. Obi-Wan is still stumbling after him. His relief leaves him with a brief moment of lightheadedness. 

Obi-Wan follows him through the alleys and to their place of residence, up the stairs and down the silent hallways. The boy does not let go even once they return to their room. Qui-Gon feels the pressure of his grip as he moves around their room, securing the locks and latching the window panels. The clinging grip slackens. Then there is a slight pressure against his back as Obi-Wan edges close and leans against him. 

He turns his head to glance behind him. “We’re back safely,” Qui-Gon tells him softly. “You can let go now. Obi-Wan?”

Obi-Wan’s eyes are almost closed. His breathing is quick and shallow. Qui-Gon does not look at the damp tracks on the boy's face. Instead he carefully, carefully pries the edge of his robe from the boy’s fingers. 

Qui-Gon does not turn him loose, even once they are unattached. Instead he studies his padawan’s hands next to his, so much smaller than his own, with narrower fingers and smoother palms. Notes the broken and ragged nails, the dirt and scraped skin on the knuckles. Obi-Wan, always so contained, does not feel present here in the room at all. He might as well not exist, for all Qui-Gon can sense him in the Force. 

But here he is. Qui-Gon can feel him and touch him. Perhaps that is the reason why he does what he does next.

“Let’s clean you up,” he says. He grips his padawan’s shoulder and steers him to the ‘fresher. Obi-Wan goes without comment, lets Qui-Gon take his dust-and-ash streaked robes off. 

He dampens a linen towel with warm water and wipes Obi-Wan’s face, carefully removing a line of dried blood near his hairline. His student’s eyes are still glassy. He pauses to check his pupils for concussion. A slight dilation, as he had suspected. 

_What did he see?_ he demands of the Force. _I cannot help him, cannot do anything for him until he lets me in._

_Then, master, you now know your next step_ , the Force admonishes him. 

But he can stall a while longer. The cut on his padawan’s forehead is embedded with several particles of glass. He locates a clean needle in his field pack and works the pieces of glass out of the wound, then cleans the cut with a bacta pad. 

Then he kneels in front of the boy and takes one hand. Obi-Wan finally stirs. “You don’t—” he begins, in a cracked voice.

“It’s all right.” He wipes the boy’s hand, working on each finger, cleaning away dirt and dust. 

“I don’t understand. What is happening to me?” A fearfulness, in the boy’s voice. “Why do I keep seeing these things?”

“They are visions. Possibilities, events that might unfold.” The Force is unknowable, and he is not to presume comprehension. The Force is more than he can explain or understand, he is aware of this, but is at a loss for how to explain such things to his young apprentice. 

He does not look up from wiping the boy’s hands. But he moves more slowly, giving the boy time to speak without being looked at. He asks gently, “Why won’t you tell me what you see?”

“I don’t want you to know,” Obi-Wan chokes out. Misery and fear leak out past his shields. Qui-Gon brushes his fingers across the boy's palm, starting in the center and gradually moving to the tips of each finger, gentle touches to ground him. “I did not want you to think of me as weak. Unworthy.”

“It is your feelings that make you who you are. Your ability to feel compassion, mercy, love. Your great strength, padawan, never a weakness.” And it may kill him someday, Qui-Gon fears. The Force only knows. He shudders away from the bleak thought.

“I’m not worthy of such a gift.” Tears leak from Obi-Wan’s eyes. “It should go to someone else, someone more powerful. I’m not strong enough.”

“You are stronger than you know. Your blind spot is seeing your own capability, Obi-Wan. You do not realize all the goodness and courage you possess.”

Up until now, Qui-Gon has believed that boy has been keeping him out consciously. But he is starting to wonder, now. Perhaps Obi-Wan himself is not even aware of how strongly he is containing his consciousness. 

“Let us try something. Can you open your mind and try to find me, in the Force?”

Obi-Wan stares at him, uncomprehending. “I sense you, of course. You’re right here.”

“But can you reach for me?”

The boy’s puzzled look tells him everything. He waits patiently while Obi-Wan fumbles, trying to reach him. Then Qui-Gon thinks of their shared trance. “I have an idea.” 

He stands up and takes the music box from Obi-Wan’s sleep couch. He lets the beads play a few notes. “I thought of this, when I searched for you in the Force. Listen for this note.” He projects out the sound of the note, high and clear. The sound resonates out into the Force. And then Obi-Wan finds him. 

_Show me what you see_ , he murmurs.

_I don’t want to go back. I’m afraid I’ll drown._

_I will guide you back,_ he reassures the boy, but it is some time before Obi-Wan trusts him. His padawan keeps him near the surface for a time, adjusting. First Obi-Wan shows him brief flashes of visions and dreams, strange mixtures of familiar places and foreign sensations, remembrances of experienced lived and of days that have not yet come. Then their connection deepens, and Obi-Wan shows him a dream of the ashir tree that grows in the heart of the Temple. Stumbling over a root while running through the gardens, picking its fruit off the ground. 

_I stole those fruits as well, when I was a youngling,_ Qui-Gon remarks, and he feels rather than sees Obi-Wan’s sudden smile. _What else have you seen?_

More visions, confusing and abrupt and full of violence. Hot sand underfoot, many faces with the same eyes. Then, reluctantly, Obi-Wan shows him a vision, almost complete, as vivid as through he is watching events unfold in front of him.

Flashes of violet light and hollow sound pulsing through high-ceilinged rooms; the whisk of black robes through an open door, hatred and spite. Then Qui-Gon sees scarlet light bloom through his own chest, and witnesses Obi-Wan’s frantic fear and fury. 

The last of Obi-Wan’s shields come down then, and Qui-Gon is struck with the force of all his feelings— bewildered incomprehension, all the clinging guilt and shame, fear for what his master should think of him for carrying such emotions. And more, beyond that.

Qui-Gon takes them out of the trance, gently, steadily. There is a tremulous feeling in his chest. He was not aware that Obi-Wan loved him so deeply. Needed him, yes; for protection and instruction and correction; wanted to impress him in the manner of all students, true, but love—he has not expected that.

Obi-Wan says in a broken voice, “I just want it to stop.” 

“Oh, padawan,” he says.

He thinks about hearing Obi-Wan’s voice calling for him, full of fear and distress, and his sudden fierce need to get to him, to shield him from the blast. He has always prided himself on his clear head, his calm compassion, and detached demeanor. 

But Obi-Wan has a way of taking all he knows to be true about himself and turning it all on its head. His padawan pulls out parts of him from undetermined depths, from where there are no words for feelings, only images that float up to the surface and become of vast importance: A sudden smile, a thread woven into a braid.

This desire to protect. To comfort. To keep him close. He had not known that such things lived inside of him. And yet, deep inside the Force, he had seen to the core of his own heart, and all that he held there.

Sometimes Qui-Gon no longer recognizes himself. 

And so he does not say, _You must learn to manage your suffering on your own._

“Come here," he says, and Obi-Wan slowly leans forward and presses his head against Qui-Gon’s tunics. For a long time, there is no sound but little shuddering breaths against his chest. 

_There is time,_ the Force reminds him. He is the boy’s master for a reason, and there will be years of time to teach him to handle these episodes alone. For right now, he is here, and he is what Obi-Wan needs; he will gladly offer what comfort his presence possesses. He would like to protect him from this, though he knows he cannot, any more than he can keep a Jedi padawan out of harm’s way.

“You must be tired,” he murmurs when Obi-Wan is no longer shaking so.

“I don’t want to sleep. I hate what I see when I do,” Obi-Wan chokes into his tunics. “I want to sleep, and not dream.”

“I will guard your dreams tonight.”

“You can do that?”

“With anyone else, no. But with you—I think so.”

He lies on his side next to Obi-Wan on the sleep couch. The boy matches his breathing unconsciously, falling into the same pattern of inhales and exhales. He sighs deeply, and so does Obi-Wan. Qui-Gon looks on as he falls into sleep, lightly at first and then the blue-black depths of a deeper slumber. 

_Where does he go, in this sleep?_ he questions the Force, and in return he gets a quizzical look. 

_Ask him yourself,_ the Force seems to suggest, and so Qui-Gon bends his head over his padawan’s, until his forehead almost brushes Obi-Wan’s, and closes his eyes. 

Obi-Wan is fathoms deep into a dream. Qui-Gon catches the quicksilver flash of a feeling—delight, laughter, oi-oi berries crushed between fingers and staining one's mouth, a trace of childhood returning. He catches glimmers of thought passing through his padawan’s mind, revealed in bursts of memory and prerecognition. A petal falling off a flower, a teaspoon clattering on the table. 

And himself. He is there, in a dream that makes Obi-Wan laugh out loud in his sleep.

Obi-Wan’s dreaming mind touches his, seeking, craving reassurance, and before the boy is quite awake, Qui-Gon is already reaching back, sending _Still here, always here_ back to him, and his padawan subsides, turning over on his side and growing still once more. And Qui-Gon watches him, his young face smoothed out, the slightest trace of a frown still there on the corner of his mouth. Feeling at the gossamer connection floating open between them. 

The Force is not kind to those who chose to surrender to it, Qui-Gon knows. And Obi-Wan has chosen the Force. Will chose the Force, time and time again, even at the cost of everything he holds dear. And the Force in turn has bequeathed him this gift. 

_What are your plans for him?_ Qui-Gon asks with dread in his heart. 

The Force rarely parts aside the veil of insight for him. Yet it relents now, and reveals an aching, unbearable loneliness, profound emptiness so great and all-consuming that Qui-Gon recoils on instinct. Heat, dust, barren deserts where life had once been; emptiness in a galaxy where there had used to be missions and trillions of echoing voices to respond and connect to the Force. And Obi-Wan, the last of his kind, now the sole avatar for the Force's currents, choosing to take on the this burden and making it his own. 

He touches the short braid hanging limply on his padawan’s shoulder, and thinks of how Obi-Wan has given himself to the Force and Qui-Gon has given himself to Obi-Wan, the many ways they are bound together. Guardian and ward, teacher and student, and something more besides. 

The Force speaks to him then, as it rarely does, in his ear like a whispered voice. _He is not yours, Jedi. He has given himself to something greater._

_I must help him,_ Qui-Gon thinks in despair. _Is there anything I can do for him, to ease his burden?_

The Force considers his request. Then it shows him a path. A possibility, if he chooses to take it. 

_A hard way,_ the Force cautions. _No Jedi has chosen this path in millenia._

_I am merely a teacher,_ he admits to the Force, _not meant for a greater destiny. But my student—I must help him. I will take this path for my padawan_ , _so he will not have to endure his burden alone._

“He is not mine,” Qui-Gon says aloud. “But I am his.”

The Force hears him and recedes, leaving Qui-Gon and his padawan alone in the room, with only a lingering dream hanging between them. 

  
  
  
  



End file.
